The present invention provides a system that compresses and decompresses an image. The system includes a first codec a first stage codec for identifying runs of pixels of a defined value in a data stream of the image data beginning from the left and right margins of a line, such that information regarding the runs is assigned as a header and appended to the data stream. The compression device includes a second stage codec for scanning over remaining data in the data stream and compressing all but the header by utilizing a Huffman encoding scheme to reduce amount of data stored in the data stream, wherein the Huffman encoding scheme interleaves Huffman code values with unencrypted data while maintaining long word boundaries for the unencrypted data. The second codec also performs the operation of decompressing a compressed image.